Looking up reviews is a pretty common way to determine if you do or don't want to do business with a company. But not all reviews can be trusted.
When Sears Garage Door Solutions of Glenview became the target of fake reviews on Google, and couldn't get any help, they asked NBC 5 Responds to step in.
NBC 5 Responds reporter PJ Randhawa sat down with the owner of the business, Michael Brownstone, to read over the fake negative reviews.
"Iron Man gave us that review. We even got one from Hillary Clinton," laughed Brownstone.
No surprise, Brownstone says Iron Man and Hillary Clinton are not actually his customers.
In fact, he says these are part of more than 100 fake negative reviews that were posted about his company on Google.
"They would have similar verbiage in them for services that we don't offer, like an impact door, which is a hurricane door for, you know, different parts of the country or defective track, cheap parts," explained Brownstone.
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He said he followed Google's protocol for reporting the fake reviews, more than 90 in one month. But he never heard back.
Brownstone explained the process of contacting Google was exhaustive. "I probably sent 60-plus e-mails with no responses, and I got nowhere with them. We sent a letter to Google in California, certified letter. We faxed our legal department and we got zero response from them whatsoever," said Brownstone.
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When he couldn't get the fake reviews taken down, he wrote to NBC 5 Responds for help.
Our NBC data editor analyzed all of the reviews of Brownstone's business and found an "explosion" of reviews posted all around the same time, with similar wording.
NBC 5 Responds contacted Google, and a few days later, the company got back to us, saying in part: "We've determined that the reviews on the ads in question are fake and we've removed them."
Now that Brownstone has Google's attention, he's working with them to get the last of the fake reviews removed. "NBC 5 came through as our hero," he told us.
Taking Action Against Fake Reviews
Earlier this year, Google announced it's been using a new algorithm to identify and take down fake reviews since 2023. It explained: "It does so by examining longer-term signals on a daily basis — like if a reviewer leaves the same review on multiple businesses or if a business receives a sudden spike in 1 or 5-star reviews. In 2023, this new algorithm helped us take down 45% more fake reviews than the year before."
But that didn’t seem to help Brownstone.
How to Spot a Fake Review
NBC 5 Responds talked with Professor Marshini Chetty at the University of Chicago about Brownstone's experience. Chetty is an associate professor of computer science.
"Just like with anything on the internet, don't believe everything you read," said Chetty. She went on to explain, "If you can click on the review and see the reviewer profile, that's another way you can check like, has this person reviewed other products?"
In Brownstone's case, you can spot the fake reviews because you can’t click on the reviewer’s profile and there’s no way to reply to the review. That's not the case for the legitimate reviews left for Sears Garage Solutions.
